You chose Workday to be the single source of truth for your global people function. Here's why the most complex part of it is still running somewhere else — and why that's now worth re-examining.
If you're the CHRO, VP of People, or senior HR leader who built the business case for Workday, you made a bet. You told the board that consolidating onto one global people platform would give the company better data, faster decisions, and less operational fragmentation. And for most of what HR does, that bet paid off. Hiring workflows, org structure, compensation data, performance management, employee records — it's all in Workday now, connected and visible.
But one function never made the cut, and it's arguably the most complex, the most heavily regulated, and the most consequential when it goes wrong: global payroll.
Global payroll is still running outside Workday. Not because you decided it should, but because there wasn't a clean way to bring it inside. So someone on your team found a workaround. Then they found another one. And over time, those workarounds calcified into a permanent parallel operation that sits alongside Workday but doesn't talk to it.
The strategic cost of the exception
This isn't just an operational inconvenience. It's a strategic problem.
You chose Workday to be the single source of truth for your global people function. But every time someone asks a question that involves global payroll data — what's our total cost in Germany? How does our compensation spend compare across regions? what's the fully-loaded headcount cost for this business unit? — the answer doesn't come from Workday. It comes from a spreadsheet someone assembled from three different global payroll vendors, in three different formats, on a timeline measured in weeks rather than minutes.
